As someone who lives just outside of the lockdown zone and has parents and many friends who lived within it, I will say that I haven't heard anyone I know express any anger over how the situation was handled or say they felt intimidated by the government response.

Why? So that you can have a ruler who's of your own ethnicity? Is that really that important?

You are putting words in my mouth. I said self determination. How selfs choose to select a ruler is no matter of mine. And again, if those selfs decide to prevent other individuals from their own self determination, they invalidate their efforts out of the gate.

To be fair the usual formulation is 'self determination of peoples' from Wilson's 14 points, which presupposes that the concept of a people is both coherent and of moral weight.

The portion of the Bush Doctrine that dealt with "spreading democracy" was often compared to Wilson's Fourteen Points. Both seem to rely upon the assumption that under a democratic form of government, that people will naturally tend towards open and liberal societies that would by friendly to western interests.

Side note: I was just in Albania this month for a visit. The Albanians LOVE Mr. Wilson. He stood up for Albanian national integrity and their existence as a country at the League of Nations and kept them alive a single state.

There's a statue of him in one of the squares, top hat an all. And the plaza is named after him.

You are putting words in my mouth. I said self determination. How selfs choose to select a ruler is no matter of mine. And again, if those selfs decide to prevent other individuals from their own self determination, they invalidate their efforts out of the gate.

What if a people prevents their own self-determination? That's the problem here: things are ugly and complicated. Chechens won their independence but couldn't even hold it from their own extremists. Regardless of who was at fault for that situation, the region was about as rulable as Afghanistan is now and was a breeding ground for extremism that has been spilling over into Russia (and now the US) ever since. That's why Putin put a thuggish strong-man in charge and pumped tons of money into the region to try to stabilize it.

I really wish the media would stop interviewing the mother of the bombers. She's clearly in a hysterical state of denial. It might make for awesome sensational quotes, but to read stuff like her claiming that the entire bombing was a hoax, and that the blood was just paint, it doesn't add anything to the subject. It's not like she actually has any info that it was all a hoax. It certainly has to anger the victims and their families to read the mother of the bomber claim that they're part of some conspiracy against her children, and they weren't injured/killed. They might as well be interviewing some random nutjob on a street corner.

Events like this are entertainment. We want shock: bullets flying, people running in fear, SWAT teams marching through the streets. We want drama: talking heads arguing, mothers grieving, candlelight vigils. So that's what the media gives us. Unfortunately, it just encourages these events and drums up fear that leads to widespread support of eroding civil liberties to make us feel safer. But who's to blame: the people who want this stuff or the dealers that deliver it?

This article goes into the apparent degradation in the skills and sophistication of terrorists, arguing that this has come as a result of our successful attempts at decapitating leadership and forcing efforts to shift to relatively unsophisticated and unsupported individuals.

It's an interesting read, but I'm particularly interested in their analysis of the Tsarnaev brothers. I've been shaking my head this entire time as the media and law enforcement described how "sophisticated" they were when I saw absolutely no evidence of that.

As the post-game analysis on the Boston bombings grinds on, a conventional wisdom is starting to take shape based on the heated claims of pundits, officials, and security experts, as well as the post-9/11 liturgy on terrorist theory. It goes something like this: Terrorists are highly intelligent foes who wield violence strategically, bringing immediate and significant attention to their political ends relative to their limited means.

...

But let's get one thing straight: The Tsarnaev brothers, wherever they may have learned to make bombs or hate Americans, were no geniuses.

...

Yes, the suspected bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, allegedly managed to brutally kill several people, wound scores of bystanders, and instill fear throughout Boston. But this has less to do with their terrorism chops than the ease of wreaking havoc in a democracy.

...

Details of the tragedy remain sketchy, but evidence indicates that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev aimed to launch a series of mass-casualty attacks after the initial marathon bombing. Although idiocy is agnostic on preferences, masterminds would probably have had an escape plan or some cash on hand. Here's a few pro tips: Don't mingle with people who have license plates supporting terrorism affixed to their cars; don't post pro-Islamist sentiments on public websites; don't brag to innocents about being responsible for the bombing; and don't run over your brother with a car. This was amateur hour: After apparently flattening his older brother accidentally, Dzhokhar reportedly placed a pistol in his mouth and tried to kill himself. Once again, he failed. As John Mueller and Mark Stewart point out, such stupidity is "quite typical" of recent terrorists targeting the U.S. homeland.

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Before, al Qaeda leaders carefully selected operatives from tens of thousands of jihadists in Afghan training camps. Today, Inspire magazine and other online outlets appeal for anyone at all to commit violence against the infidels. The remaining leadership no longer even attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff. Al Qaeda has an open-door policy, praying for disgruntled people like Tamerlan and Dzhokhar to fashion bombs from leftovers in their mother's kitchen.

The decentralization of America's terrorist enemies is usually seen as advantageous for them. Decentralization is thought to unleash the human potential of militants, making their groups more flexible, innovative, resilient, and specialized. More concretely, decentralization is said to confer a bounty of strategic advantages on terrorists by rendering them harder to anticipate, detect, infiltrate, and dismantle or kill. This is the theory of the leaderless network, the elusive and independent "cellular" structure. Yet decentralization also carries costs to terrorists by eroding their quality as they move farther away from the leadership. This is because the leaders of terrorist groups, like in many other organizations, have a better sense of what they're doing than the freshest hires.

Any idiot could have pulled off what they did. Of course, maybe that's what so scary. We need to believe that they were extraordinary, because to think otherwise would be to acknowledge just how easy it is for a few individuals to disrupt our otherwise peaceful society.

I guess I'm out of the MSM loop. I haven't heard that these guys were smart, only that the were amateurs with orange belt level Google fu..

I only included snippets of the article, but they referenced Federal counter-terrorism officials and the like expressing the opinion that this was some sort of "sophisticated" operation. It's not just media over-hype.

Quote:

Here's just a quick sampling of the reactions to the marathon attacks, from some serious people: Michael Leiter, former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, characterized the Boston bombings as a "sophisticated attack," an opinion echoed from Congress to the FBI. Pennsylvania Rep. Patrick Meehan described the bombings as a "sophisticated operation." Jack Cloonan, who from 1996 to 2002 headed the FBI's Osama bin Laden unit, said the attacks exhibited unmistakable "sophistication." The terrorists were highly trained, said Ron Craig, a professor of pyrotechnics who has advised the FBI. And so on.

Indeed, ever since the publication of the 9/11 Commission report, it seems that most analysts reflexively default to the official position that contemporary terrorists are "sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal." Most academics of terrorist theory have since poured concrete on this foundational thesis. Political scientist David Lake of the University of California, San Diego, for example, thinks that terrorists are "rational and strategic," while Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter likewise argue they are "surprisingly successful in their aims."

When in reality, any idiot with internet access and the ability to buy fireworks and a pressure cooker could have done it.

So is that argument actually showing that despite how much we've Warred on Terror, we have no way of stopping it? (i.e., the obvious)

In a sense, yes. Though the article gives a lot of credit to counter-terrorism operations for disrupting organized networks that could do much more damage, leaving us with the relatively incompetent lone-wolves as the leftovers. That's arguably worth something.

Those quotes sound like boilerplate CYA to avoid the public panic about just how simple and easy it is to pull off something like the Tsarnaev brothers did.

In fact, I'm trying to think of a way they could actually have been less sophisticated. Dropping off bags with bombs made from a pre-made pressure vessel, pre-made black powder, and whatever small metal bits they could find doesn't exactly strike me as something planned by a terror mastermind.

I mean, I guess they could have dropped off a bundle of dynamite sticks with a lit cannon fuse, like something out of Looney Tunes, but that would actually impress me more in that they were able to find a source for the dynamite.

Yeah, not being able to read the article, I wonder if those quotes come from before or after the guys were captured/killed. I could see them making such statements beforehand, when it was possible that there wasn't much evidence to find the bombers. But I imagine any expert hesitating to claim these guys were "sophisticated" after everything was said and done. If anything, I think the experts were probably just as presumptive as most of us were that, in order to do something like this, you had to have some decent skills.

Coming up with your next bombing target while driving around in a carjacked vehicle that is about to run out of gas, and you don't have any cash on you, isn't exactly sophisticated.

(Some of the links below are behind a NY Times paywall. If you don't have full access, the partial summaries displayed will give you the gist.)

In the process of rebutting the assertion that this was somehow a unique terrorist act and that the manhunt's conditions were wholly justified, I tried to think back to organizations that had a history of violent attacks, had recurrent gunfights with police, were seen by many as terrorists, and had declared war on the United States.

Hmm, I thought: Black Panthers.

What about a violent gunfight where police were killed and a suspect got away on foot leading to a massive manhunt?

Took about 30 seconds of searching to find this example. _______________________________________________

On May 2, 1973, members of the Black Liberation Army (an offshot of the Panthers) got into a gunfight with police on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Didn't even make the headline. It did make the NY Times front page, but it was below the fold.

Here's the NY Time's news summary printed that day. See if you can find the article on the slain trooper and Panther shootout. (Hint: it didn't make Major Events of the Day. The big news was Watergate-related and Nixon extending price controls on oil companies.)____________________________________________________

Why bother with this exercise? (Other than demonstrating my OCD )

Simply put, tragic as that terrible event years ago was, it just wasn't that important in the grand scheme of things.

And society, at the time, knew it.

Yet, the Panthers who were in that shootout, along with their colleagues, posed a far more serious and imminent danger than punks with internet access, imo.

By building up last week's events to grandiose proportions, we give those punks importance they don't deserve.__________________________________________

Unlike the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the recent Boston bombings are just the latest of criminal bombings, or, in today's lingo, "acts of mass destruction," that Americans have dealt with since the inception of the nation. And our lack of knowledge and reference to these historical precedents continues to wrongfully guide both our government's lack of will to differentiate between war and domestic anarchy and our citizens' acquiescence to a reduction of our constitutional rights....Framing the Boston bombing as a terrorist act without viewing it in a historical context will, in the end, lead to justification of the depreciation of individual liberties, all in the misguided name of national security.

The [redacted] brothers were nothing more than immigrant anarchists carrying on a tradition of political violence, this time framed in religious fervor. And we should not get carried away in exaggerating the significance of their attack, in light of our historical past. On April 15, Boston and America were truly not another battlefield in the "war on terror."

In the process of rebutting the assertion that this was somehow a unique terrorist act and that the manhunt's conditions were wholly justified, I tried to think back to organizations that had a history of violent attacks, had recurrent gunfights with police, were seen by many as terrorists, and had declared war on the United States.

Hmm, I thought: Black Panthers.

What about a violent gunfight where police were killed and a suspect got away on foot leading to a massive manhunt?

From what I know, the Panthers are actually a bad example for your argument. I'm not aware that they declared war on the US as a whole. Their ideology was pretty unclear other than officially being socialist, but in practice all their violent acts were aimed at specifically at police. AFAIR, they never targeted run-of-the-mill citizens.

The generally understood meaning of terrorism in the modern sense is an attempt terrorize the wide public via broad-based, highly visible, acts of violence.

In the process of rebutting the assertion that this was somehow a unique terrorist act and that the manhunt's conditions were wholly justified, I tried to think back to organizations that had a history of violent attacks, had recurrent gunfights with police, were seen by many as terrorists, and had declared war on the United States.

Hmm, I thought: Black Panthers.

What about a violent gunfight where police were killed and a suspect got away on foot leading to a massive manhunt?

From what I know, the Panthers are actually a bad example for your argument. I'm not aware that they declared war on the US as a whole. Their ideology was pretty unclear other than officially being socialist, but in practice all their violent acts were aimed at specifically at police. AFAIR, they never targeted run-of-the-mill citizens.

The generally understood meaning of terrorism in the modern sense is an attempt terrorize the wide public via broad-based, highly visible, acts of violence.

I think you're right and it's good of you to point out the correction.

For that matter, I'm not sure that what happened with the Panthers and their suppression/elimination has much bearing on the issue of whether or not the LEO response to The Brothers Tsaranaev was appropriate -- the issue which was Gisboth's original point of departure.

Those things being said, I do also appreciate the point in Gisboth's culminating link: the point that we do damage to ourselves, as a country founded on liberty and rights, when we hand over such episodes of domestic anarchy to the overweening interests of the national security state.

In the process of rebutting the assertion that this was somehow a unique terrorist act and that the manhunt's conditions were wholly justified, I tried to think back to organizations that had a history of violent attacks, had recurrent gunfights with police, were seen by many as terrorists, and had declared war on the United States.

Hmm, I thought: Black Panthers.[..]

By building up last week's events to grandiose proportions, we give those punks importance they don't deserve.

If by "building up last week's events to grandiose proportions" you're referring to the media blowing things out of proportion, I agree fully. I haven't been able to watch CNN for more than 30 secs over the past week because it's basically 24/7 "Boston Terrar!" I spent much of the past two days in Cambridge, Waltham, Watertown and Arlington, the people out there I know are over it.

Regarding "this was somehow a unique terrorist act and that the manhunt's conditions were wholly justified," a Google search turns up events in Contra Costa CA, Montreal, Chicago, Santa Cruz, Kansas City, Bismark ND, Cedar City UT, Austin, Chino Valley AZ, Miami, and Sacramento where transit lines, Amtrak, highways, schools, neighborhoods and towns were "shut down" as police pursued armed subjects who were engaged in domestic violence shootings, gang shootings, and police shootings. Of course there are going to be situations where the police/offical response to a violent incident was smaller (or even larger), every situation is unique. But the response in Watertown and Boston was not unprecedented, shutting the city down for the past couple of major storms was far more disruptive (imagine if I-93, the Pike and Logan were shut down, *that* would have been a mess).

So in terms of framing the police response to Thursday night's events as a "criminal bombing" - that's pretty much what happened.

Why are you posting links to that cesspool. The CNN video is clearly of a a woman sick with grief and in deep denial because of that. Gateway Pundit is simply an awful website that perpetuating a lot of the misinformation and Saudi national conspiracy nonsense.

Perhaps you know more than me about certain news sites? I'm passing along links that are related to this event that are coming to light today and being posted on highly-trafficked sites. I believe that one was posted on Drudge this morning.

...

Was Drudge not a clue? Or just glancing at anything else on Gateway Pundit would indicate calling it a news site is being a bit too charitable? Regardless, how hard would it be to go look at the primary source, which was a CNN video, instead of uncritically passing the blog post along with no commentary?

Considering this story has been rife with misinformation and confusion from the beginning, it's crazy to me that people pass around questionable links without any skepticism.

when we hand over such episodes of domestic anarchy to the overweening interests of the national security state.

The national dialog, thanks to rabid media, grandstanding politicians with a party agenda, consultants and commentators on the hustle, and an uncritical public, has been turned into a monologue. One in which the subject is a grandiose external threat to fortress America, from all sides.

Once things settled down a bit after 9/11, and it appeared that no one was going to be able to fly plane-bombs at the country anymore, and the wars wound down, the talk began to center on the possibility that the evildoers are already here!, OMG, just waiting for the right moment. Sleeper cells. Secret agents. Undercover terrist children raised here and in sekrit training to steal your freedoms.

The numbskull public gets what it deserves when it hands its own analysis and thinking over to hucksters. And then votes for them or pays them.

Fair point. It wasn't a perfect equivalence. (edit: Although, the Panthers didn't just target police. For example, they also hijacked at least two passenger jets: one to Cuba and one that ended up in Algeria.)

I'm embarrassed to say I don't even remember the turnpike shootout. (Probably because i'm not black.) But, hey, there was a lot of stuff going on, then. (and that link is just 65-70)

Heck, how often is the first bombing at the World Trade Center, in May of 1970, remembered? (Before it was even finished!)

Remembering those years gone by the past couple days has prompted me to think of Aldo Moro and the red brigade every time I see Skoop's tribus, and wondering how the US would deal with something like that today.

All this has happened before. All this will happen again.

Quote:

The generally understood meaning of terrorism in the modern sense is an attempt terrorize the wide public via broad-based, highly visible, acts of violence.

Remembering those years gone by the past couple days has prompted me to think of Aldo Moro and the red brigade every time I see Skoop's tribus, and wondering how the US would deal with something like that today.

Has there been a non-aircraft-related bombing/attempted bombing in recent years that we've overreacted to? Things went pretty back to normal after the marathon bombing. The mailbox bombs from a couple of years weren't a big deal. The Times Square attempted bombing didn't result in any big changes. I could point you to a couple of pipe bomb/bottle bomb incidents over the past couple of months in WMass that you probably didn't even hear about back east.

Shootings on the other hand tend to cause authorities to bring the hammer down.

Those quotes sound like boilerplate CYA to avoid the public panic about just how simple and easy it is to pull off something like the Tsarnaev brothers did.

It is easy if you set your mind to it and there has been a history. Seventies radicals used bombings. The Unabomber used bombs. It is just another method of killing and maiming. I think the hard part is getting to the point where you feel justified in killing or injuring innocent people. Thankfully I think only a very small percentage of people are able to cross that threshold.

Not sure if this can be taken seriously, but if Tamerlan tried to enter Saudi Arabia and the Saudis had some intelligence to merit a warning that would suggest some sort of tie with organized terrorist groups.

You want to see an overreaction to a "bombing" based on fear? Here you go.

The weird thing is that the principal has a quote that makes it sound like he understands how it was an innocent mistake, with no intent to harm anyone. And then the article notes how she's being charged with a felony and has been expelled from school. I don't think either one of those things would have happened without that same principal's approval. I could see a suspension from that. Pretty much anyone that threw an M80 down a toilet at my school got that. Expulsion and a felony seems just a tad bit of an overreaction.

You want to see an overreaction to a "bombing" based on fear? Here you go.

The weird thing is that the principal has a quote that makes it sound like he understands how it was an innocent mistake, with no intent to harm anyone. And then the article notes how she's being charged with a felony and has been expelled from school. I don't think either one of those things would have happened without that same principal's approval. I could see a suspension from that. Pretty much anyone that threw an M80 down a toilet at my school got that. Expulsion and a felony seems just a tad bit of an overreaction.

my understanding is that the principal has no real say in it due to zero tolerance laws.

my understanding is that the principal has no real say in it due to zero tolerance laws.

I'm pretty sure that most educational zero-tolerance policies are actually policies handed down from the school board level, not actual legislation. But yes, the hands of administrators at the actual school level are almost always tied.

A Chechen man with ties to Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was shot and killed by an FBI agent in Orlando early today when the man attacked the agent, the FBI said in a statement.

The FBI identified the person shot and killed as Ibragim Todashev, 26.

According to the FBI and local news accounts, the shooting took place in an apartment building on Peregrine Avenue while Todashev was being questioned about the bombings and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

“The agent, along with other law enforcement personnel, were interviewing an individual in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing investigation when a violent confrontation was initiated by the subject,’’ the FBI said in a statement released around 9:30 a.m. today.

“During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries,’’ the FBI said. “As this incident is under review, we have no further details at this time.”